Oregon Christmas tree growers feeling that holiday cheer

The OregonianWorkers cut and stage Christmas trees for shipment Wednesday at Aurora-based Yule Tree Farms, which ships about 500,000 trees a year. The holiday trees represent a $101 million industry in Oregon.

Fewer people traveling for the holidays means more people staying home, which means more Christmas trees in American living rooms.

"There's kind of a small shift toward more family gatherings," said Dave Silen, a manager for Holiday Tree Farms of Corvallis, the state's largest Christmas tree producer, shipping about 1 million trees a year. "Christmas trees provide a good opportunity for that situation," Silen said.

Oregon is the nation's biggest producer and exporter of Christmas trees, selling about 7.3 million trees a year, more than twice that of No. 2 North Carolina. The state produced 38 percent of the nation's holiday trees in 2009.

"My sense is the total numbers are at least steady and this year could go up a bit," he said.

The reason for the soft prices can be traced back to the confidence levels growers had in 2003, when the trees being harvested today were planted. "Prices were good, people felt comfortable, and they planted more," Ostlund said.

Seven years later, ample supplies have prompted many growers to drop prices. But Joe Sharp, managing partner of Yule Tree Farms in Aurora, isn't one of them.

"Trees are selling better than they did last year," he said

Yule Tree ships about half a million trees a year.

Oregon's annual harvest is well over a third of the nation's total of 23 million to 25 million, according to Mike Bondi, an Oregon State University forestry professor. He's also the extension agent for Clackamas County, which produces about 2.2 million Christmas trees a year, or 1 out of every 10 trees in the U.S.

This year marks the 500th anniversary of the Christmas tree, which is widely believed to have originated in Northern Europe.

But the Christmas tree as an export industry took root in the foothills of the Cascade and Coast mountains during the 1950s, Bondi said. "There's a lot of history, a lot of knowledge among the farmers, and lot of services," he said.

And the Interstate 5 corridor provided an excellent avenue for shipping trees, particularly to its top customer, California.

Mexico adopted stricter regulations this year aimed at keeping pests from crossing the border, making shipping there more difficult. Bondi said new rules are largely political, designed to protect Mexico's own Christmas tree industry.

But Gary McAninch, director of the state agriculture department's Christmas tree inspection program, said shippers have not experienced significant problems since the new regulations went into effect last month.

Bondi said the industry faces changes on three fronts.

The first is genetic, an attempt to design a better Christmas tree that retains its needles. The second is improvement in pest control and the third is improvements to harvesting technology to cut down on the large labor costs involved.

"It's all done by hand," he said.

Another recent change is the marketing emphasis on environmentally friendly "real" trees, aimed at combating the rise of artificial trees.

But after rapid growth in market share, the nation's fascination with fake trees is waning.

In 2009, Americans bought 28.2 million real trees and 11.7 million artificial ones. But, according to a survey conducted by the National Christmas Tree Association, 31 percent of American consumers plan to buy a real tree this year, compared with 8 percent who intended to go the artificial route.